Fairness in Grading.

Abstract

This article reviews the difficulties in assigning grades to student work, briefly reviewing highlights from the history of grading practices. It concludes with the suggestion that, given the impossibility of comparing grades either within an institution or between institutions, instructors should base grades on a measure of an individual student's progress during a course.

One of the most important duties of a faculty member at the end of a term is that of determining the final grade that individual students will receive in the class. As difficult a process as this is, it is made even more difficult not only by having to determine the process to arrive at the final grade, but also by the various interpretations of that grade that will be made later by others.

These assigned grades are designed to serve a variety of purposes. Dr. James S. Terwillinger wrote that grades are to serve three primary functions: administrative, guidance, and informational. He indicated that grades should be viewed only "as an arbitrarily selected set of symbols employed to transmit information from teachers to students, parents, other teachers, guidance personnel, and school administrators."(1) However, unless the meaning and interpretation of the grades assigned are universally understood, the system, no matter how carefully designed and understood by the instructor awarding the grade, will not be an effective means of communication to others or over a period of time for cumulative evaluation.

This is true even if the purpose of grading is more specifically defined--as in the following list by Professor James M. Thyne: "To ascertain whether a specified standard has been reached; To select a given number of candidates; To test the efficiency of the teaching; To indicate to the student how he (sic) is progressing; To evaluate each candidate's particular merit; and To predict each candidate's subsequent performance."(2)

In the development of an individual or institutional grading policy, it is important that a decision be made as to the reason for the assessment. If it is merely to have twelve grades at the end of the term or that departmental policy requires that all work be graded, these will become ends in themselves, and the interpretation of the final assigned grade will become even more difficult. Even with a definite purpose beyond "institutional policy," it is extremely difficult to have a consensus as to how to arrive at a grade to properly evaluate the progress made by any individual student in a particular course.

Dr. William L. Wrinkle wrote in 1947 of six interpretation fallacies that are made in understanding course grades. The number one fallacy that he listed in his book was the belief that anyone can tell from the grade assigned what the student's level of achievement was or what progress had been made in the class.(3) This fallacy is as widely believed and probably as correct today as it was when he wrote it in 1947.